Wrapping Up September

A slow start to the week, but things started picking up again near the end. The job above was a rush job for the Chronicle that came in Wednesday with a Thursday deadline. Then on Thursday I got one from the WSJ for an early Friday afternoon deadline. (pictured below). I had scheduled a rehearsal with a music partner for an upcoming gig, and was hoping to clear out my Friday afternoon, so I planned on doing the Journal job early. I also had a job for Newsday come in on Thursday. Being the only black and white illustration of the bunch, I didn’t figure I had to worry too much about that one, and planned on getting that one done early Thursday evening.
Of course, it ended up being the most complicated one of the bunch. The article was about the rise in heroin use in the suburbs, and not knowing much about drug use, I assumed heroin=needles and based my original sketches on that concept. (one of which is pictured below)
Well, heard back from the AD, and it turns out that the ‘heroin use’ in the article is about snorting or smoking and not shooting up, so I revised the sketch concept on Thursday and proposed a reworked version of the second of my sketches, which ended up looking like this in the final version. Was okayed by the AD and I went to finish Thursday night.
Friday afternoon I get a call from a different designer at the same paper, who had taken over the project for the weekend, and now apparently ‘smoking’ is no good, they want ‘snorting’, so I worked up a revised version (working around the music rehearsal in the afternoon), and managed to get the finish to them by 5.
And just heard from another client, and looks like I’ll have a project to work on over the weekend as well. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting on the ‘pirate’ project, which has now stretched an extra month in the sketch approval process. Also, today, I received a couple copies of a book that I illustrated the cover of back in February of this year. The format turned out a little differently than anticipated, but the illustration printed nicely despite some unusual design and layout choices.